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To Focus or Not to Focus, The Marketer’s Dilemma
Ever hear the saying “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks?” Neil Patel and Eric Siu recommend that you approach your marketing in the same way. Nah, don’t actually throw pasta at the wall. They mean you should try stuff, see what works, and double down on that.
Marketing your business takes more than trying all the shiny, new toys just because everyone else is. In today’s Listen, Eric explains understanding your industry and the way your business works is key.
If you’re going after a bunch of tactics at once, choose 5 or 10 that make sense with what you’re selling. Then switch gears and give a hyperfocus to the one that gets results.
Circling back to Neil for a hot second. He shares this golden nugget, “Have laser focus, but the moment your growth rate starts slowing down and declining, that’s when you should consider expanding.”
Dang, that’s good advice because it’s going to happen—your growth rate in one area will slow down over time. When it does, it’s time to throw spaghetti at the wall again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Short and sweet, Marketing School’s latest will definitely help you hit the reset button. Check out the show notes below and you know what to do if you wanna hear the whole thing.
- (00:50) People have different concepts of how marketing works
- (01:02) Your tactics all depend on what your business is, what its status is, etc.
- (01:37) Pick a tactic that works best for you and focus all your energy on that
- (01:55) Once that tactic is operating to its best abilities, add in other tactics
- (02:24) Eric worked at a company that tried a bunch of different tactics and found video marketing worked the best, then focused all their energy on that
- (03:14) Neil met the Legal Zoom/Shoedazzle CEO; he told Neil to have laser focus
- (04:10) Steve Jobs said that he is better at saying “no” than other people
- (04:40) If your growth rate is accelerating, hit the gas. If it’s decelerating, think about what you can improve
That’s about it! Told ya it was short. But still packed full.
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The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Interview Questions
It almost doesn’t matter where you are in your career, you’re gonna be involved in interviewing in some capacity—whether that’s as an interviewee or the interviewer. So it never hurts to brush up on great interview questions that you might get asked one day, or that you can ask one day.
Hubspot is a company that hires a ton of marketers. Their CMO wrote about his 14 favorite questions to ask marketing candidates. His questions are designed to get at the core of who the candidate is, how s/he thinks about things, and how they get things done.
A few of our favs:
- Draw a funnel on the whiteboard showing 10,000 visitors, 500 leads, 50 opportunities, and 10 new customers. Now, pretend you have to decide what your marketing team should do to improve on these metrics. Which areas of the funnel would you focus on, and what would you do differently to change these results? Push the interviewee to get specific about what strategies they would use.
- We have two potential designs for the homepage of our website, but we don’t know which one to use. The CEO likes one, and the COO likes another. Half the company likes one, and the other half of the company likes the other. Which one should we use? The best answers to this one involve the candidate asking tons of questions about the average website visitor.
- What do you read, and how do you consume information? With how quickly marketing changes, you’ll probably want to see how potential candidates keep themselves up to date.
- What’s an example of a lead-generating campaign you’d be excited to work on here? The ideal answer to this one shows that the candidate did their research and has at least a basic understanding of your customer.
- Between videos, ebooks, blog articles, photos, podcasts, webinars, SlideShare, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest … there’s a lot of potential content our team should produce for inbound marketing. How do we do it all? The best candidates know you shouldn’t do everything. They’ll zero in on the fact that you should focus on your strongest areas.
Yikes, we’re outta room. Get the full list →
Bit of news for y’all. We’re occasionally going to feature tools and tactics that we use on the job. These mentions will always be unpaid and unaffiliated (unless we say otherwise). Here’s today’s…
Pro-tip: Broken links are ruining your SEO efforts. They happen over time as the websites you’re linking to change their URLs or just disappear entirely.
You should be running broken link analyses on your website at least once per month. Fixing those links is an easy way to boost your SEO. Case in point…
We once had a client that had over 700 broken links on their website. It was a mess. But, when we fixed all of them, their Domain Authority bumped up by 4 points.
Yes, fixing links is tedious, boring work, but that’s what we have interns for, right?
Kidding, kidding. Don’t dump all the monotonous work on your interns.
Here’s the tool we use to check for broken links:
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Mariah Gets Hostel
Coming off #Carnage2018 we can’t seem to shake Daniel Gurwin’s quote, “Trust Your Weird.”
The creative folks from HostelWorld.com trust theirs for sure. Their latest video offering is an odd mash-up of 90’s pop celebrity Mariah Carey with an unlikely stay at a hostel.
It pokes fun at the celebrity’s diva reputation with the title “Even Divas are Believers”
The video received a crushing 3.9 million views in one week!
Sidenote: We love how Wes Anderson’s style of directing has subtly influenced commercial advertising.
Our biggest takeaway, aside from the videos awkwardly entertaining approach, is finding ways to introduce unexpected elements into your content.
Creating this juxtaposition helps people remember your brand not just the ad.
“It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.”
Scott Belsky
